Technology giants including Google Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have committed to collectively give more than $3 million to support the free, widely used computer code that underpins the Internet.

As participants in the Core Infrastructure Initiative, the companies will each provide $100,000 per year for a minimum of three years. The money will back projects aimed at improving open source software, code that can be modified and used by individuals and companies for free. While the total may be loose change for the tech firms, it could be quite a sum for open source developers, many of whom do work in their free time for little or no pay.